Qt Applications as Browser Applets

"Qt Everywhere" is the motto of Nokia's GUI toolkit smiths. Now developer Morten Sorvig has transplanted Qt apps into the Firefox browser.

Nokia's Sorvig is using Google's Native Client (NaCl) technology for the purpose. The browser plugin executes native code, currently on 32-bit Intel systems. Because running code on the web provides certain security risks, NaCl uses a sandbox model that applies similar security rules to the code as the browser does for JavaScript.

Sorvig ported fundamental parts of Qt to NaCL and brought the first Qt demo applications to Firefox, such as the wiggly widget. His blog entry, "Take it with a grain of salt" (a pun on the NaCl name), also shows a Qt elastic nodes example in a video.

Source code from Qt for NaCl is under LGPL and ready for download from the Gitorius repository.